Artificial Intelligence Integration in Patient Platforms and Surgery
Blessy Phillip
Staff Writer
Several states, including Kansas, Idaho, and Minnesota, are currently facing significant nursing shortages. Combined with physician burnout, an aging population, and various workplace challenges, the U.S. healthcare system is facing a crisis. In response, healthcare professionals are increasingly looking to the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to not only enhance patient experience, accuracy, and outcomes but also to reimagine traditional healthcare practices.
Among the most notable developments in this transformation of the healthcare industry, are integrations of AI in surgery and patient-facing platforms. On the patient front, Oracle Health, a leader in health information technology and services, has revealed plans to release an AI-integrated electronic health record (EHR) platform. The company hopes to utilize AI to automate various time-consuming processes, improve access to health records, streamline appointment scheduling, and facilitate better communication between patients and healthcare providers. The platform, built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, will be capable of more than just the average patient record system as the company hopes to also integrate analytical capabilities based on patient data, clinical trials, social determinants, and pharmaceutical data. Features like voice-activated navigation tools, Health Data Intelligence, and Oracle’s clinical AI agent will make the platform a dynamic and evolving system, empowering healthcare professionals to make more informed decisions and improving patient outcomes. Seema Verma, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, describes the platform as a “…system of intelligence that spurs action to ensure better patient outcomes.”
Similarly, in other news with AI integration and healthcare, history has been made for robotics and imitation learning. For the first time, a robot has been trained to perform a surgical procedure, arguably just as skillfully as the trained eye of a surgeon, using videos of human surgeons conducting surgery. The team of researchers from Stanford University trained the da Vinci Surgical System robot on three basic tasks needed for various surgery procedures such as lifting tissue, suturing, and using a needle. Then, using a model composed of hundreds of videos taken from the cameras on the arms of other various da Vinci robots used in surgery, a database was created for the robot to imitate. While the da Vinci system also contains some flawed techniques, the researchers refined the data to equip the robot with the best data. The robot was then able to learn and imitate the surgeons effectively within a short amount of time.
The success marks an important milestone for imitation learning as healthcare professionals will no longer have to program each and every move during a medical procedure. The win is an encouraging step in the right direction as robotic surgery is one step closer to fully operating on its own. Researchers are looking to further these goals of automated robotic surgery to increase accuracy, precision, and overall patient satisfaction regarding medical procedures.
The use of artificial intelligence in healthcare is a rapidly expanding industry as it has the potential to change the future of healthcare and improve health outcomes for current and future patients. AI integration will also potentially relieve some of the stress on healthcare systems to create temporary solutions for the crumbling system.
Contact Blessy at blessy.phillip@student.shu.edu